Precise spatial normalization through novel neonatal brain MRI and CT atlas templates

Abstract

The assessment of brain development is indubitably of critical importance specifically in the first two years of life. In comparison with the developments of other organs, the process of brain maturation from birth to two years of life is very meteoric. As a result of the complications of the study of the newborn brain, scarce researches have been done in this field. Spatial normalization, which modifies individual brain shape to match a reference space, is a necessary step in group level statistical analysis. In this paper, at first, we suggest a new approach for enhancing the normalization of CT scans to a reference space. We then explain our steps towards creating MR and CT atlases. Afterwards, we utilize 13 and 9 high resolution neonatal MR and CT scans to construct atlases based on our suggested methods. These scans are captured from a group of new-borns with gestational ages between 39 and 40 weeks at the time of exam. We subsequently demonstrate the created multimodal atlas. Finally, we discuss the results of qualitative and quantitative assessment of our multimodal atlas, for example, through anatomical local deviations.